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Will The Free Software Desktop Ever Make It?

Phoronix: Will The Free Software Desktop Ever Make It?

Luc Verhaegen, the former Novell employee who previously worked on the RadeonHD driver and is known for butting heads with other X developers and making ambitious proposals like modularizing DRI and Mesa drivers, has out a new blog post. In something not too far off from where he said the Linux desktop will be dead if Keith Packard got his way in merging graphics drivers back into the X Server, his new blog post is entitled "This way, the free software desktop is never going to make it."..

I don't know if it will ever "die" but with issues like Luc was having I can see it going nowhere in a hurry. Let face it, if an old hat like Luc was having difficulty how can we expect the masses to adopt a free desktop without addressing those issues?

So, the system was working fine out-of-the-box, but he wanted to use the really really weird "virtual screen" configuration, which is something only used by him and god knows who else and apparently was added back only to appease him, and he claims that something is wrong because such rare option is not well documented and not easy to use?

So, the system was working fine out-of-the-box, but he wanted to use the really really weird "virtual screen" configuration, which is something only used by him and god knows who else and apparently was added back only to appease him, and he claims that something is wrong because such rare option is not well documented and not easy to use?

WTF...

Lots of people use that. It's even in Windows, available thourgh a simple right-click menu on the desktop.

I don't know if it will ever "die" but with issues like Luc was having I can see it going nowhere in a hurry. Let face it, if an old hat like Luc was having difficulty how can we expect the masses to adopt a free desktop without addressing those issues?

I agree. While Linux is easy to use if you do not have any problems, it is a nightmare for normal users once something does not work out of the box.

Unfortunately the best desktop distros are also the ones considered "hard". Desktop linux has been ready for years it's just we don't have any distros which don't both totally suck to use if you know what you're doing, and offer 2 click install for everyone else. The software itself is fine aside from the hard problem of GPU drivers which probably isn't going to be solved for years and years if ever.